fromIn the Wet

by Neville Shute

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from In the Wetby Neville Shute is one of the background documents
relevant to the document series that discusses limiting franchise directed to
mitigating the worst consequences of unrestricted franchise within the context
of poorly educated populations.

index

introduction

In this story, Neville Shute describes a multiple voting system introduced
to the British Dominions. The prime speaker here is an Australian pilot. (Interestingly,
Australia has now moved ahead and introduced an enlightened form of proportional
representation [PR] voting, termed the alternative vote system [AV]. Each
voter is permitted to indicate a second choice if the first choice is not
elected.)

[p.91]
He hated these people [of Britain] for their lack of spirit, for their subservience
to civil servants, for their outmoded political system of one man one vote
that kept them in the chains of demagogues.

The pilot raised his eyebrows. ‘I didn’t know that. You don’t
have it, do you?’

‘No. How does it work out in practice?’

‘I don't really know,’said David. ‘I've never thought
about it much.’

Captain Osbome asked, ‘Have you got more than one vote, yourself?’

The pilot nodded. ‘I'm a three vote man.’
[…]
‘What do you get three votes for?’ the captain asked.

‘Basic, education, and foreign travel.’

‘The basic vote - that’s what everybody gets, is it?’

‘That’s right,’ the pilot said. ‘Everybody gets
that at the age of twenty one.’

‘And education?’

‘That’s for higher education,’ David said. ‘You
get it if you take a university degree. There’s a whole list of other
things you get it for, like being a solicitor or a doctor. Officers get it
when they’re commissioned. That’s how I got mine.’

‘And foreign travel?’'

‘That’s for earning your living outside Australia for two years.
It’s a bit of a racket, that one, because in the war a lot of people
got it for their war service. I got mine that way. I didn’t know anything
about the Philippines, really, I when I came away, although I’d been
there for three years, off and on.’

‘You had a wider outlook than if you’d stayed at home,’
the captain said. ‘I suppose that's worth something.’

‘I suppose it is.’

‘So you’ve got three votes. How does that work out in practice,
at an election?’

‘You get three voting papers given to you, and fill in all three,
and put them in the box,’ the pilot said.

‘You're on the register as having three votes?’

‘That’s right. You have to register again when you get an extra
vote - produce some sort of a certificate.’

They sat in silence for a time, looking out over the crowded harbour in
the sunset light. Rosemary came to the saloon ladder and spoke up to them.
‘You can get more votes than three, can't you?’ she said. ‘Is
it seven?’

David glanced down her. ‘The seventh is hardly ever given,’
he said. ‘Only the Queen can give that.’

She nodded. ‘I know. We get them coming through the office. I should
think there must be about ten a year.’

‘The others are straightforward,’ David said. ‘You get
a vote if you raise two children to the age of fourteen without getting a
divorce. That’s the family vote.’

‘You can’t get it if you’re divorced?’ asked Rosemary
smiling.

‘No. That puts you out.’

‘Do you both get it?’

‘Husband and wife both get it,’ David said.

‘What’s the fifth one?’

‘The achievement vote,’ said David. ‘You get an extra
vote if your personal exertion income - what you call earned income here -
if that was over something or other in the year before the election - five
thousand a year, I think. I don’t aspire to that one. It’s supposed
to cater for the man who’s got no education and has never been out of
Australia and quarrelled with his wife, but built up a big business. They
reckon that he ought to have more say in the affairs of the country than his
junior typist.’

‘Maybe. And the sixth?’

‘That’s if you're an official of a church. Any recognized Christian
church - they’ve got a list of them. You don’t have to be a minister.
I think churchwardens get it as well as vicars, but I’m really not quite
sure. What it boils down to is that you get an extra vote if you’re
doing a real job for a church.’

‘That’s an interesting one.’

‘It’s never interested me much.’ said the pilot. ‘I
suppose I’m not ambitious. But I think it’s a good idea, all the
same.’

‘So that’s six votes,’ Captain Osborne said. ‘The
basic vote and education, and foreign travel, and the family vote, and the
achievement vote, and the church vote. What’s the seventh?’

‘That’s at the Queen’s pleasure,’ said David. ‘I’'s
a bit like a decoration. You get it if you’re such a hell of a chap
that the Queen thinks you ought to have another vote.’

‘Aren’t there any rules about getting it?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said the pilot. ‘I think you
just get it for being a good boy.’

[p.124]
‘You’ve experimented in your States, and found what seems to be
a better system of democracy.’

[p.241]
There was much talk in the Conservative papers about electoral reform, and
there were bitter articles in the Labour papers about an audacious attempt
on the part of the Tories to kill democracy and to regain an obsolete form
of government by privilege. It was all rather unhappy reading, a record of
disunity on fundamental principles that he could not recall in his own country;
he put the papers aside with a sigh, nostalgic for the country on the far
side of the world that he had left so recently. […]

[p.242/3]
‘I’ve been reading the weeklies to find out what’s been
happening while we’ve been away. There seems to be a lot going on about
this multiple voting.’

She nodded. ‘I think there is.’

‘The Government seem very bitter.’

‘Yes,' she said, ‘they are. People are usually bitter when they
see something threatened that they believe in with all their hearts and souls.
And this Government believes in the old principle of one man, one vote. They
believe in that very sincerely.’ […]

[p.272]
There was to be a Governor-General in England as in all the other Dominions,
a buffer between the elected politicians and the Queen, selected by the Queen
for his ability to get on with the politicians of the day while serving her.
Somebody who could take the day-to-day hack work of Royalty off her, who could
open the Town Halls and lay the foundation stones and hold the Levees and
the Courts and the Garden Parties, and leave the Monarch free for the real
work of governing the Commonwealth.

Neville Shute
and his writing

Neville Shute was very much a story-teller. He was one of those people who
is often in the right place at the right time. By far his most interesting
book is, in fact, his autobiography, Slide Rule. I would recommend
this book to anybody as background reading to the first half of the twentieth
century. He was a youth in Dublin at the time of the 1916 uprising, his father
being a high-ranking civil servant. He obtained a typical upper-class education,
going into engineering at Oxford. He participated in the building of the great
airships and the development of the De Havilland aircraft company. Five GoldenYak award, without reservation.

Now to Neville Shute’s fiction
He can be rather cloying at times, but as stated he is a master story-teller.
Several of his novels are set partly in England and partly in Australia. In
every one, I find the background detail interesting. Beyond the Black
Stump, Requiem for a Wren, The Far Country, In the Wet, The Rainbow and the Rose, A Town
like Alice and On the Beach. The last two were made into
films, which were well-received, but are not my favourites amongst Shute’s
books. Shute has written much other fiction, which I have not read.

Of Neville Shute’s fiction, I think I would recommend either of
Beyond the Black Stumpand Requiem for a Wren

On the Beach and In the Wet are science-fictiony,
a métier which I do not think he handled as well as the great
sci-fi masters.On the Beach involves a dying world, ruined by radiation from
a nuclear war. The book was written right at the height of great fear of nuclear
war. The film is well photographed in black and white, with the usual professional performance
by Gregory Peck in the lead.

Town like Alice - be not confused, as the book title says, the
plot is the building of a town like Alice Springs.
There is also a black and white film version of A Town like Alice [ATLA]. My reaction varied between dull and depressing, but I am told by others
that it was a moving, ‘emotional experience’. I am also told that
ATLA has been filmed to a much higher standard, in colour for Australian TV,
but I have never seen it.